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jon swartz
“AI could be a great tool for writers—until it replaces them”
From the Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera to a Senate subcommittee in Washington, D.C., from a location summit in Hollywood to a Silicon Valley conference on the future of television, filmmakers, writers, novelists, musicians and other artists are all talking. .
With equal fear and optimism, they are trying to contemplate what the future might look like. Will AI destroy creative communities in Hollywood, New York, Nashville and elsewhere? Or will it free the artist to do better?
The creative community is deeply divided, with Microsoft Corp (MSFT), Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL)’s Google, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. (META), Adobe Inc. (ADBE) and Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) pushing hard to Generative AI technologies that threaten the jobs of content creators and others. A battle line has formed between the creative community (artists who fear AI will ruin their careers) and AI developers and studios, which are using the technology as a means for independent filmmakers to make big studio-style films .
In four separate events over the past week, examples of AI-generated creative content revealed two contrasting expectations in the entertainment industry: AI can free content creators from menial tasks so they can focus on their passions project — or it could cost them their jobs.
“You ask science to evaluate art, and that’s always been the fundamental limitation of artificial intelligence,” writer, producer and showrunner Marc Guggenheim said in an interview. “It might be good at imitating human voices, but it’s only imitating.”
Guggenheim, whose credits include Arrow and Trollhunter: Tales of Arcadia, sees artificial intelligence as a disruptive force that will replace writers and stifle creativity. Hollywood screenwriters are on strike over fears that studios will replace them with generative AI bots, but when AI does invade screenwriters’ rooms, it may show up in a more subtle way.
More: As writers strike, will Hollywood call on AI to fill the void?
A prime example, Guggenheim said, is how AI can turn taking notes during meetings into an exercise in formulating story pitches. Writers have been at odds with studio executives at these meetings for decades, and they say the notes lead to more commercial, less controversial, less diverse and more generic content, Guggenheim said. Haim said.
The worry is that when AI is given information about past successes, it produces less thinking outside the box. Giving the example of the five-act storyline in the 2008 box-office hit “The Dark Knight,” Guggenheim said that the first annotations AI could make on the script would be a move to the traditional three-act formula. “An AI note might say that this method is not structured properly,” he said.
However, the efficiency of AI in organizing meetings and writing processes presents an attractive advantage for studios and streaming services trying to cut content costs while streamlining production cycles. Instead, Hollywood insiders say eliminating repetitive tasks frees creative workers to spend more time on passion projects.
“The show will be inspired by this technology,” “The Mandalorian” showrunner James Blevins said at AI on the Lot, a conference in Hollywood last week that explores the promise and dangers of artificial intelligence . “When you look at these tools, look for opportunities instead of seeing the sky fall.”
Adding “complexity at scale”
A key opportunity offered by artificial intelligence is the ability to add texture and nuance to visual effects and lighting at a fraction of the cost and time required by traditional means. According to Chris Perez, director of product marketing at Perforce Software, advanced AI-driven virtual production will be able to add “complexity at scale” to “more realistic, immersive environments” such as buildings and realms through surface detail and shadows. Visual effects work just as well in a superhero epic or a 1930s period film.
An early debate about the unpredictability of fast-moving technology has spilled over into the technology industry itself, with executives at major artificial intelligence suppliers taking objections.
“These Hollywood screenwriters should be very scared. Do you think Hollywood will not use it?” Tom Siebel, CEO of C3.ai Inc. (AI), said in an interview. To emphasize his point, he did a quick lookup of himself using ChatGPT-4. A sparkling biography was crafted in minutes.
“Imagine writing a script for a sitcom or a procedural crime show,” Siebel said. “Gen AI may have the intelligence and prose of an eighth grader right now, but it’s a fast learner. It’s going to be crazy. Super scary.”
It’s not just writers who are afraid. James G. Sarantinos, editor-in-chief of Creative Screenwriting Magazine, says actors have heard that studios want to digitize their voices and bodies for use on set as well as for advertising and promotional purposes. And writers, he said in an interview, “may become glorified engineers writing AI scripts.”
But change is necessary for any economy as diverse and dynamic as the U.S., and one Silicon Valley venture capitalist believes it won’t be as drastic as some expect.
“We’ve gone from an agrarian society to an industrial society and now to a knowledge society,” David Bloomberg, founder and managing partner of venture capital firm Blumberg Capital, said in an interview. “A lot of these doomsday, Malthusian theories are almost always wrong. In the short term, AI will mostly make you work more efficiently.”
Others in the tech industry, however, urged caution.
“This AI inflection point is still about people,” ServiceNow Inc. (NOW) president CJ Desai said in an interview. “But we need to make sure it’s human augmentation. AI can never replace human intelligence.”
AI is just a tool, says Andy Parsons, senior director of content authenticity programs at Adobe Inc. (ADBE). “It doesn’t have to take over humans. If our lawmakers and others get it right, it’s very much a value-added tool to help humans do more,” he said in an interview. “But especially for creatives, creative professionals, and the audiences Adobe serves, these are phenomenal creative tools.”
The products that startups are developing will define the future of AI in writing and other creative work. For example, Sudowrite, an artificial intelligence “writing buddy” launched Thursday, has already helped dozens of writers create novels.
“I’ve heard multiple times that it doesn’t necessarily use fewer people, but that it’s more personally efficient,” said Monica Landers, StoryFit’s CEO. “There’s a certain level of excitement about the future.”
StoryFit uses AI to help the film industry create scripts and characters. “I was prepared for negativity, and instead I had people with decades of experience who had never seen anything like this say they would find a way to involve me in financing if they needed to so they to use their artificial intelligence,” she said in an email from Cannes this week.
Disruptive technologies unsettle creatives
People in the creative industries have traveled this disruptive path before. The introduction of the camera in the early 1800s forced portrait painters to turn to Impressionist art; The Jazz Singer in 1927 introduced sound to film, ending the careers of some actors, directors, cinematographers, and others; and in the 1990s, computer animation transformed How animated films are made.
The history of technology transforming creative work has led some, including Scott Steindorff, a television producer and documentary filmmaker whose credits include “Eleven Station” and “The Chef,” to comment on AI takes a pragmatic approach.
“We’re not going to stop it. We need to understand it and accept it,” he said in an interview. “When the Internet came out, everyone was against it, but it ended up helping us. AI is like an advanced Google.”
Currently, a generative AI can hammer out a mediocre script when someone gives it a story idea and some characters. But that could change in the coming years as technology improves.
“AI could be a great tool for writers—until it replaces writers or reduces writers’ rooms,” said Jason Vredenburg, a scholar of literature and film and an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology.
While it’s capable of replicating cookie-cutter content from shows like procedural crime shows, pulp sitcoms, and superhero movies, potential downsides to AI are that it’s repetitive, carries residual bias, and relies on stereotypes about race and gender. Stereotypical descriptions, Guggenheim said.
“There’s clearly this gold rush. People are moving too fast,” Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, said in an interview. “We still need the human element. You can augment creativity, but you can’t completely replace it.”
In fact, StoryFit’s Landers says some artists are embracing the “intersection of intelligent human decision-making and AI speed improvements” to enhance their work.
At the AI Summit in Hollywood, Pinar Seyhan Demirdag, an artist and creative technologist who developed the generative AI project Cuberic, explained it from a scientific and artistic perspective. “You dance with the machine to get the gist of how to do it. AI tools make us think differently,” he said.
“Whether it’s a news article, a book, a song or a Hollywood movie, the screenwriter has always sat in command, tapping into human creativity and imagination,” said Volker Smid, CEO of Acrolinx, an artificial intelligence software-as-a-service platform. won’t disappear.”
Therese Poletti contributed.
-Jon Swartz
This content was created by MarketWatch operated by Dow Jones & Company. MarketWatch is published independently of Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(End) Dow Jones Newswires
05-27-23 0903ET
Copyright (c) 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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